


The Case of the Trouser Tuber

by kenopsia (indie)



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Fluff, M/M, Sherlock Has A Crush On John, What's a guy to do?, but John has standards, crackfic, nutty point of view, potatOS
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-01
Updated: 2014-02-01
Packaged: 2018-01-10 20:32:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1164214
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indie/pseuds/kenopsia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>CRACK. John seems to have a potato. The potato is quite the elephant in the room. Sherlock just wants to help.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Case of the Trouser Tuber

**Author's Note:**

  * For [General_Button](https://archiveofourown.org/users/General_Button/gifts).



> This is some serious Crackfic. Warnings for EXTREME SILLINESS AND SHERLOCK'S NUTTY POV. Apologies to anyone who has me on their subscription list because of my serious fics. They're on the agenda, but I was blocked today and General Button told me to get writing, and prompted this. She is a very weird miracle, dipped in ketchup.

Sherlock, after learning that his primary downfall that took him from the “potential partner list” to the “do not initiate romance with list” was something as simple as the fact that he _did not seem to notice if John was in the room or not_ was dumbfounded. John had supported this claim with the following evidence, casually listing as he flicked out his fingers to keep track: _leaving me to pay for the cab, running off before I am in the cab, holding me accountable for things you tell me when I am not present._

The list had gone on, but at some point Sherlock had stopped listening and started devising a solution.

Now, he had an alarm on his phone that pinged him twice daily, at 2 and 9 PM to ask him if he’d checked for John lately.

At nine, his phone chimes and he thinks, _Yes, where is John?_

*

John is in his room. Sherlock can ascertain from outside his room that he is, but there’s no point in keeping track of John if John isn’t keeping track of Sherlock doing it. Sherlock, could, he supposed, present John with the data he had collected, but John tended to react strangely to being told that he was a data point.

Sherlock burst into his room after only a moment of deliberation. “John, I will require you to help me in the – ” he gets out before he realizes that he perhaps should have knocked.

“… John, what is that?”

John put his face in his hands. “The best I can figure, a potato.”

“Which species? Are there any eyes? Have you tried—”

“No, actually, you being excited about this was not part of the plan today,” John said, moving towards Sherlock to crowd him out the door.

What John sometimes forgot, though, bless him, was that Sherlock was immune to any social cue that he desired to ignore at any given moment, so as John was getting close, Sherlock stood his ground, and after a moment, John stepped back to avoid touching Sherlock with his… potato. (Russet, Sherlock decided, as John stepping towards him put him in the proper angle to verify.)

John has to resort to bodily shoving Sherlock to the outside of the door, so he has to continue his line of inquiry through the door. “John, at approximately what time did you notice the appearance of the root vegetable in question?”

Sherlock pulled out one of the hundreds of very small notebooks he had squirrelled about the flat, his clothing, and miscellaneous drawers for dramatic note-taking. “Because at approximately two in the afternoon, you were on your way to Tesco’s and seemingly experiencing no undue stress.”

John groaned from the other side of the door. “Of course you’d bloody pick now to get all –” and stumbled out, trousers hastily pulled up. He wrestles Sherlock’s notebook and compact pen from him, flicking through the pages, his mouth twisting into a grimace. “If you must know,” he said, punctuating with short little jabs of the pen on the little notebook that made his hand look positively average-sized. Sherlock was startled, and pleased with himself, and a little aroused. “At around fifteen hundred, I stopped on the way home for some chips and a pint.”

“On the way home,” John flicked over to a previous page, Sherlock wondered why until, ah, obvious. “ _The subject_ encountered the need to _have a piss,_ and at promptly seventeen hundred, he removed his trousers and encountered…”

At this point John paused to flip the page (one of the reasons Sherlock merely pretended to be writing or reading from them – it did so muss a dramatic delivery.) “A—” John paused, seemingly running out of steam.

“Pants potato?” Sherlock helpfully supplied. “Trouser tuber?”  

John made a frustrated noise and moved to go back into his room. “No, John, come along, we need to go. We can fix your unruly genitals later. We need to go down to the morgue!”

John did not seem to want to go to the morgue with Sherlock, which he wasn’t pleased by, but making John do things he didn’t particularly want to do frequently worked in Sherlock’s favor. A John in a combative mood was a John who was secretly chuffed. He needed a good tussle to rouse him from the humdrum of daily life, and Sherlock was only happy to oblige. It was one of the many good qualities he possessed and would bring to the table as a potential lover.

John trudged behind Sherlock with grace and long-suffering, which is to say that John muttered darkly under his breath the entire way downstairs, and as they hovered at the edge of the street as Sherlock hailed the taxi, and the whole length of the taxi ride to Bart’s, and the way up to where Molly was waiting with some of the most interesting tumors Sherlock had ever _seen._

“Not in the mood for a tumor full of maggots, today, John?” Molly asked cheerfully, fluffing one of the many pastel bobbles across the front of her jumper.

“John’s phallus seems to be a potato at the moment,” Sherlock supplied helpfully, because sometimes John was shy of explaining his own physical ailments. “He will likely be tense until he has a chance to assess if the change is permanent.”

John made a strangled noise and turned beet red. Sherlock attempted to check John’s airway, and got a crushed finger for his trouble.

“Oh!” Sherlock cried, in a pitiful voice. “Is this about the cab? I had _meant_ to pay for it, but I was so excited, I forgot.”

John, for his part, looked slightly mollified, and began to regain some of his human being coloring.

Molly looked a little blotchy as she sent them off. “T-take care, John!”

*

“I am not amused,” John said, to be clear.

Sherlock lifted his hand and roused his supernatural willpower to summon a taxi. “Of course not.”

“With _you._ ”

Sherlock frowned as a cab pulled up. “With me?” he asked, before turning to the driver. He was careful about that now. “Baker street, please.”

John closed the door behind Sherlock after he slid all the way across for him, because John was raised by wolves. “I’m taking the tube,” he said, in that voice he used in public when he wanted ordinary people to think he was sane. “You just have a nice think on the way home.”

*

John had absconded with the notebook Sherlock typically kept in his trouser pocket, and the one in the coat had congealed in some sort of coffee scented mess, and it was basically a single sheet, half a centimeter thick and mottled brown. Sherlock tastefully tossed it out the window and closed his eyes to write instead on a wall of his mind palace.

He had regular maintenance there, of course, to deal with it later, so he went straight to the foyer with a biro in hand. _REASONS JOHN WATSON IS UPSET_ , he wrote, in his best penmanship. _1._ and then drew a blank.  

When Sherlock opened his eyes, he had several items on the list, but the cabbie had stopped the car and had turned almost all the way around to look at him. “Oi! I don’t drive no nutters,” he said, and Sherlock realized that when he had retreated into his mind palace, his hand had somehow moved into a gun shape, raised to his chest level. It was his body’s natural defense mechanism to protect him while he was defenselessly sequestered into his own mind.

Sherlock looked pointedly at his finger-gun, which was admittedly pointed at the cabbie. “It doesn’t have actual ammunition,” he pointed out.

The cabbie pointed at the door, and he picked up his box of tumor samples sadly.

The walk home would give John time to arrive first, Sherlock gathered, and decided to be ready. “I am sorry I forgot about your middle-class approach to money,” he tried aloud. People kept giving him a wide berth as he practiced. “I will endeavor not to leave you in charge of paying the cabbie so often.”

Actually, that sounded terrible.

“Mycroft!” he called in defeat. “Are you happy now? Come rub it in, but please explain to me why John Watson is angry and how I am ever going to take him to bed!!”

The people who hadn’t already moved out of Sherlock’s range did so immediately.

As neither Sherlock’s mobile nor any of the nearby payphones began to ring, Sherlock decided that either Mycroft was stumped as well, or for once in his miserable life, Mycroft was doing something other than pointing CCTVs at his younger brother. Sherlock would have been ecstatic any other time, but now he was filled with the bleak misery of owning a brother with the worst timing of anyone he knew.

*

When Sherlock finally reached 221b, he could hear the water running as he tried to slink past Mrs. Hudson.

To no avail, she used her matronly glare to maneuver him over to a chair. “Sit, Sherlock,” she said, in a voice entirely too stern for someone carrying a tin of biscuits. She put one in each of his hands before lowering herself into the chair opposite him. “Now, I try to stay of out of you boys business,” she said, and Sherlock almost choked on his snickerdoodle.

“But! Poor John came through here half an hour ago, miserable and walking like, well, you know how he was walking.” Mrs. Hudson fixed him with a potent glare. “Having to run himself a bath. Now there’s something to be said for a rendezvous where you might get caught, but these things take proper _planning,_ Sherlock; you have to be _considerate._ Now when my Frank and –”

Considerate. Sherlock leapt out of his chair. “Thank you Mrs. Hudson!” He kissed her on both cheeks. “I must go attend to John now.”

Mrs. Hudson swatted his bum on the way up.

*

“John!” Sherlock said through John’s bathroom door, without even _attempting_ to jimmy his way in, although it was well within his formidable skill. “I am very sorry I was not considerate about  your genitals. You had them out this morning and it did not occur to me that you could have been attempting to manually stimulate them. I should have given you a few minutes of privacy to deal with your hormones before I demanded you come along to barts. I am also sorry that I did not stop to pay the cabbie before getting out. My consideration of money is minimal, at best.”

“And?” John said, from decidedly not behind the bathroom door.

Sherlock looked back and forth before continuing. “And… I’m sorry I haven’t solved the mystery of the Trouser Tuber yet?” he tried, in a most hopeful voice.

John shook his head minutely, but he looked a little amused.

“It’s harder than it looks,” Sherlock huffed. “You try it.”

John gave him several suggestions: “I’m sorry John that I don’t respect our privacy, even when something very strange and private is happening. I’m sorry I don’t respect your time, except how it relates to who is going to carry my box of slugs, organs, and miscellaneous stool samples. I’m sorry I told our mutual friend about the strange condition of your very private genitals—”

“Not _that_ private,” Sherlock mumbled. “Half of London—”

John tapped his foot patiently, one eyebrow raised. Behind Sherlock, the water was still filling the tub. “All of those, John. I’m sorry. I would like to help you get to the bottom of this issue.”

“I was going to have a bit of a wash, first,” John admitted. “Kind of test it out.”

“Oh,” Sherlock said, trying not to look crestfallen. “Well, if you need me, I’ll be…”

“I might require your expertise,” John said, raising the other eyebrow.

“I’ll get my goggles,” Sherlock said, feeling the excitement in his toes.

“You can’t make any soup jokes,” John warned.

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Sherlock said, and wrote it in capital letters on the front door of his palace. 

**Author's Note:**

> I think we should never talk about this again.


End file.
